Amarco feels very badly for Estil and hopes that the church can help teach people about Good. It is not their core competency but it does seem like a valuable thing to do. He figures he should probably get more context from his higher-ups after dinner, and takes them off to do that. 

His higher-ups have apparently been talking for the last four hours and used the spell Commune twice. They explain that this is very confidential but the Yeerks offered to help fight Hell. They're hoping that they can end the war bloodlessly once the Yeerks stop enslaving people. The Church of Abadar is apparently interested in hosting talks between Yeerks and Andalites and might also want to send some people along so the Yeerks can read them; there are Andalites in Sothis for some reason (??) and they are optimistic that Andalite command will agree to stop the war if they learn that Iomedae has secured an agreement with the Yeerks to free all the slaves. Everything is top secret because they're worried Hell will move if they realize the church of Iomedae has secured these resources.  Amarco is, to be clear, not to do any actual waging of war while he's there; he should just let people see where Iomedae is coming from (and let Iomedae get a good look at them through him, this goes unsaid but he understands it.)

Should we go report this to your command now? Amarco thinks at Estil.

<We should go check with Mhalir if we are ready to do that.> 

Mhalir needs to retrieve his shuttle from Mysterious Old Wizard and then he thinks they're ready to go. (He doesn't feel ready but that's kind of irrelevant to anything, right now. And he has Carissa back, at least. That makes things feel vaguely more doable.) 

He asks if anyone in Vigil can do a Sending to the wizard to ask what he did with the shuttle. 

They can do that.

It's behind Malduoni's office building. Ideally someone would Teleport over to fly it back and collect the others? Unless someone has a Teleport limit that can get everyone at once. 

Estil would be delighted to be Teleported back and then if Amarco is all right with it, he can show off how to FLY a SHUTTLE to SPACE!

"I want to talk to Lucia Ines first, if she is available," Mhalir says to whoever's closest by. 

She's available.

This is oddly terrifying! 

"I - have been thinking about whether I also want an Atonement," he says. "I think - not now - but maybe after we get back. If we succeed at convincing my people of our plan. Carissa thinks I need to have the right thoughts for it to work and I - wanted to know what those are, so I can," vague gesture, "practice." 

"So - Good is big, right? There are a thousand different angles on it. You can be Good by quietly adopting and raising eight of your sister's children when she dies of the plague, you can be Good by teaching everyone in your village how to fight wolves off, you can be Good by writing essays, you can be Good by marrying a powerful man and giving him wise advice, you can be Good by feeding every beggar you see or by opening a soup kitchen so there's not beggars or by travelling the world asking beggars what their lives are like or by writing people asking them how their city reduces its beggar population and then doing the best things you hear of. There are a lot of thoughts you could think that are Good."

(The thing Carissa was actually thinking about, during her Atonement, was that these people were very strange and she was not at all sure they had good ideas and she might well decide she wanted nothing to do with any of them...and they were fine with that. Mhalir, letting Alloran go because he thought if Alloran really became Good he'd cease to want Mhalir to die. The cleric, correcting her about what they believed, saying over and over again 'it's complicated, it's very hard, people have to be ready to fall out of it'...

Good believed that if she got to think about everything she'd be Good.

Asmodeus....observably didn't believe that if she got to think about everything she'd be Asmodean. 

Good might be wrong. Probably was wrong. Most people are wrong all the time about everything. But there was more space for her in Good than in Cheliax, even though she was nine parts Asmodean to every one part Good, because Asmodeanism was sure the Good would taint her.)

That rings true for Mhalir. The sense he's been grasping at of Good, for himself, is kind of in two parts. One, the thing about strategies being robust to making mistakes. Because he's demonstrably not skilled enough to avoid making mistakes. Two, Good is - the shape someone like him can afford to be when he has space for it? Even from the first conversation with the cleric of Sarenrae, he remembers that feeling of - recognizing a possible world that was better because he wouldn't be so hemmed in, because he would have slack to choose paths with a lower cost. Because, maybe, this world is offering him allies if and only if he follows their rules, and somehow, right now, that feels like the opposite of a constraint. It feels like a tunnel opening ahead of him into light. It feels like freedom. 

He's not sure if any of that makes sense to Carissa. 

Sort of. Carissa - doesn't actually think that Good is the shape someone like her would naturally be if you didn't put her under any pressure. But it has option value and she really really likes option value and maybe once she's heard a hundred confusing explanations of what Good people value she'll run into one that clicks. It sort of works to think about how people should get to be wizards and shouldn't stop existing. She still can't get worked up about whether they're hungry but they should exist and be wizards, there's that. 

"Atonement requires wishing you had done something differently. It doesn't have to be something you easily could have done differently, you can Atone for having killed someone in self-defense while also not wishing they'd killed you instead. But you do want a different attitude towards it than 'well, I was doing my best'. I think it often works well to be sad that it was your best, to wish you had a better best, but the details are going to depend on - what Good is, to you."

"That makes sense. I will think about it." He bows his head, well, Carissa's head but it's very obvious from the body language that it's not her speaking. "Thank you for your advice." 

"Of course. Godspeed."

And once the shuttle has been retrieved from the mysterious ninth-circle wizard, they can depart to rendezvous with the ship in orbit and - try to explain some of what they've missed, all they know is that they suddenly lost contact with Mhalir and then he sent a message hours later saying he was fine and it was complicated. 

Mhalir explains the basic events that happened to them, tersely, and then glances over at Amarco and asks if he can explain the Iomedae-related part. 

He can! Iomedae is the Lawful Good god of defeating Evil, and She along with several other gods want to get the Yeerks to stop enslaving people and the Yeerk and Andalite war to be concluded without more pointless bloodshed. They expect they can make things much better for the Yeerks, but they also expect that this will be confusing and scary, so they are sending people who can hopefully be infested and help explain it. The Church of Abadar might want to do this too. 

People...are not really sure what to make of that. It seems like it might be hard to persuade the Yeerk Council of this and even harder to persuade the Andalites of it? But they're mostly looking at the Visser and he's nodding along so probably he has a plan or something. 

Eventually someone asks what Abadar is like. They know he's Lawful Neutral but they don't really know what that means. 

The paladins are not an expert on the church of Abadar but he goes in really really really hard on the Law thing. Iomedae is lawful; she keeps her word and her servants do, and she tries very hard to be possible to coordinate with and truthworthy even when she has short-term goals that might benefit from being less trustworthy. But the main thing she is is Good and trying to fight Evil. Abadar is just...exclusively interested in Law. Positive sum interactions and negotiating across large value differences and trade and cooperation. He's probably good for coming to an agreement and He'll be incredibly dangerous to anyone who breaks it.

Mhalir is thinking that this is interesting and also pretty terrifying and he doesn't feel nearly experienced enough at operating in the world to safely try to make trades with an entity like that. 

The ship reaches jump distance and Mhalir gives the order to jump back to Yeerk space. 

The jump is uneventful. Carissa is kind of nervous. She's mostly been thinking of Mhalir as Mhalir not as a high-ranking person in the Yeerk government and she expects the Yeerk government to mostly be like the Chelish government more than she expects individual people to be Asmodeans. 

Mhalir isn't sure what he could say to be reassuring, here, so he doesn't. 

He's realizing that he didn't think at all about what message to transmit once they arrived. But they're at their original departure point - it didn't seem worth risking doing the experimental kind of hyperspace jump plus adding on going to new coordinates - and so now they need to do a regular hyperspace trip to the Council's secret base, and there's a courier ship waiting there for them still, which is a lot faster than their ship, probably he should - tell them to inform the Council he has important news for them and is en route - and he can figure out the rest on the way. 

He does that. 

Carissa tries to focus on magic; she can hold an illusion and vary it while not otherwise piloting her body, so she can get at least a little done even while Mhalir is using it. She is distractible, though.

They won't kill her; that'd be stupid. They will probably be pleased with Mhalir about returning wildly more powerful and with a plan to end the war. ...unless they secretly prefer that there be a war so they can maintain their hold on power, and killed the other slaves and will kill them too to keep the secret. ...or if they are excited about this outcome but want to claim the credit.

Mhalir can at least reassure her that he is pretty sure the Council doesn't secretly prefer that there be a war so they can maintain their power! The war is really incredibly bad and costing them massive resources and he doesn't entirely get along with many of the Yeerks in leadership but they're not like that. He doesn't think he would have managed to make it as far as Visser if they were, he's not actually good at that kind of politics, the way Carissa thinks about it makes him dizzy. 

He does think they'll be some irritating wrangling for credit, which they'll have to bear with, and that people will be concerned that whatever outcome Iomedae is willing to accept is still too restrictive for the Yeerks to live with. But he thinks they can do it. Hopes so, anyway.